John Galt Electric Cars

The US left want to mandate electric cars. Most US electricity comes from fossil fuels, but producing electricity, transmitting it, charging a battery, and then using the battery to run an engine that can drive a car is, according to the same people who promote the CoViD-19 vaccines as 110% safe and effective, produces no CO₂. All that is needed is to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I mentioned the novel Atlas Shrugged in my previous post. Shortly after leaving home, it came highly recommended by one new acquaintance. So I went to the library and found it more than 1,000 pages, so I asked for a second opinion and was told never to read it. That was 50 years ago.

It came recommended a couple of years ago, and, having more time, I read it. The author, Ayn Rand, says that university professors lie when they say no one, no matter how clever, can violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics: a clever engineer can figure out a way. So she strongly recommended John Galt electric cars. One only needs to charge the car battery once. The battery provides the electricity to run an electric motor, and the motor turns a generator that recharges the battery as one drives the car.

That annoying Second Law means electric cars running on electricity produced from fossil fuels use more fossil fuels than diesel cars.

But John Galt cars eliminate the need for fossil fuels.

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I'm glad I did not read Atlas Shrugged 50 years ago, and also glad I read it a couple of years ago. Back 50 years ago, I could not have appreciated the book, but I certainly did when I finally read it, and saw how many people are willing to bet their lives on having a John Galt Electric Car available by 2030.

Books

 When I finished high school, I met people who said I had to read Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.

I went to the library, Atlas Shrugged was about 1200 pages, so I asked, 'Why should I read Atlas Shrugged when it is 1200 pages?' All the people I asked said, 'Atlas Shrugged is terrible. Never read it.' So I didn't.

Lord of the Rings was in three volumes, and Volume I wasn't that long, so I tried to read it. Unreadable. I told the person who told me never to read Atlas Shrugged, and she said, 'You have to read The Hobbit first.'

So I read The Hobbit. And then I had to read Lord of the Rings. And it was GREAT. I even read all the appendices and other supplements.

Lord of the Rings starts with a lot of stuff explaining The Hobbit, stuff that is incomprehensible if one has never read The Hobbit. After one has read The Hobbit, it's all stuff one wants to understand. The Guardian film reviewer said he tried to read Lord of the Rings, found it unreadable (as I did before The Hobbit) and found the movie not very good. So the Guardian, once a great newspaper, has fallen.

I found the Lord of the Rings so enthralling, I read the appendix on calendars. A subject on which Tolkien was not very familiar. All his calendars were variations on the Roman calendar, which, before Julius, had 12 months of 30 days each. Not enough for a year, so every December, they'd add a few days. The goal was to have March 21 the Vernal Equinox. But they usually got it wrong. So they tried to correct the next December.

Not a good calendar. But Tolkien liked it, and had all the calendars in Middle Earth based on it.

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Julius made the months 28, 29, 30, or 31 days, with February 28 days in years not divisible by 4, and 29 days in years divisible by 4. Not quite in sync with the solar year, but close. Gregory fixed the small error. And now most of the world uses the Gregorian calendar.

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But Roman solar years are unusual. Most cultures use the moon as the month (and the words tell us that the English did before the Romans came).

But the lunar month is about 29.5 days, so 12 lunar months are not a solar year. 

Since most religions have a planting festival and a harvest festival, the dates for those festivals must be be in spring and fall. But with a 12 lunar month year, that won't happen. Not a big problem. One uses leap months to make sure some date fits a solar marker, a solstice or an equinox. If 12 lunar months aren't enough, one has a leap month.

The Chinese use the Winter Solstice. Their New Year must be after the Solstice, so, if the New Year would be before the Solstice, they have a leap month.

The Hebrews use the Vernal Equinox. So if the full moon in the month of Nisan (Nisan 14) is before the Vernal Equinox, the year has 13 months. If Nisan 14 is after the Vernal Equinox with 12 months, the year has 12 lunar months.

Why didn't Tolkien know the traditional English calendar was lunar???

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And, of course, Mohammed said that planting festivals and harvest festivals are prohibited for Muslims (since Arabs don't have planting or harvesting, their diet is based on goats), so he prohibited the 13th month. Which means the Islamic year moves year after year, Ramadan comes a few weeks earlier year after year. As does Islamic New Year.

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So most calendars are lunar calendars that are somehow tied to the year, except for the Roman calendars and the Islamic calendars.

And Easter is always just after Passover (unless you are Orthodox, when Easter is at least two weeks after Passover), but every year the newspapers are shocked that the two festivals are so close together.

History of CoViD-19

 

On 1 December 2019, a patient was admitted to a Wuhan hospital, and the physicians took samples, ran tests, and determined that the patient had a coronavirus that had never been seen before. Several more cases were identified during December, and most had been at the same wet market, so the wet market was presumed to be the origin of the virus. On 31 December, the PRC notified the WHO that they had a new coronavirus that might be a problem, but it was too early to tell. No one had died from the virus.

On 10 January 2020, the first death from the new coronavirus occurred. At this point, the Wuhan Communist Party of China (CPC) made their first big mistake: they ordered that no one mention the new virus until after their big Chinese New Year Party that would have more than 40,000 guests.

Under Mao, everyone in Wuhan had to do whatever the Wuhan CPC ordered. That was then. Today, there is a toll-free number anyone can call if they suspect corruption in any CPC, and it will be investigated. A false accusation will result in harsh penalties for the accuser. A true accusation will result in harsh penalties for the accused. Someone called the number, and a team of experts from Beijing came to Wuhan on 19 December 2020. On 20 December 2020, the PRC announced that there was a bad epidemic and measures would be taken. The entire Wuhan CPC were fired. On 23 January 2020, Wuhan was closed and everyone was ordered to stay home. Thousands of healthcare experts and other workers came from all over the PRC and, wearing PPE that look like white Hazmat suits, workers brought food and other essentials to every home in Wuhan. The PPC built two 1,000 bed hospitals in less than a month. Eventually, when no more virus was detected in Wuhan, the city was reopened. Of course, in 2019, Wuhan was a major air hub. In 2019, just about every flight from Europe to the PRC had to change planes in Wuhan. So the virus, now known as CoViD-19, got out and spread and 7 million died worldwide. Maybe. Some places wanted to say there was very little virus, and tried to find some other explanation when someone who tested positive died. Other places wanted to say there was too much virus and, if a person killed in a gunfight or a car accident tested positive for CoViD-19, CoViD-19 was listed as the cause of death (CoViD-19 impaired their driving and shooting ability?).

But where did CoViD-19 come from? The wet market?

In February and March 2020, two teams of top US government virologists published two letters in major scientific journals (letters are reviewed, but not as intensely as articles). The two letters both said that a virus created in a laboratory by gain-of-function manipulation has distinct markers, CoViD-19 did not have those markers, proving that it was zoonotic. Since it had just been discovered, the vector had not yet been found, but identifying the vector usually takes a few months, and it would soon be found. SARS started as a bat virus that was not infectious to humans, but then a Chinese wet market had rats and bats and civet cats and the bat virus managed to infect the civet cats, and the civet cat virus became infectious to humans, but not too infectious. It was mostly those people who butchered and those who ate under-cooked civet cats that caught SARS. SARS proved infectious from human to human, but not very infectious: only 8,096 people were ever infected and only 783 are known to have died. Later, bats and camels were together in Arabia, and the bat virus infected the camels and the camel virus became infectious to humans, and we had MERS. CoViD-19 would surely prove similar.

Those letters were taken up by an article in Nature. As a result, just about everyone agreed that CoViD-19 must be zoonotic, and those who claimed it came from a lab were conspiracy theorists who don’t read scientific papers and don’t understand science. And those who claimed it came from a Chinese lab were not just ignorant, but racist. And in March, 2020, I would have agreed with that conclusion.

But then, in May, 2021, Nicholas Wade revealed the truth in a paper published in a scientific journal: “The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?”. The authors of those letters that ‘proved’ that CoViD-19 was zoonotic all worked funding and directing the research at the Wuhan Virology Lab. It is possible to do ‘no-see-um’ gain-of-function research that leaves no traces, so their claim that they proved CoViD-19 was zoonotic was what is referred to in the scientific literature by the technical term bald-faced lie. It is now recognised as almost certain that CoViD-19 was developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), not contracted in the Wuhan wet market (where, since SARS, it has been illegal to sell rats and bats and civet cats). The evidence is compelling, but not absolute. There is a chance CoViD-19 is zoonotic. A small chance, but it is very difficult to prove if CoViD-19 was definitely created in the WIV because the CPC refuse access, the Institute is a classified facility.

So the PRC are acting guilty?

Not really. The virus was sent to the WIV from the Fort Detrick Laboratory where they were doing military-grade gain-of-function research until it got shut down out of fear of what might happen. The PRC CPC say they will allow full access to the WIV just as soon as the US allow full access to the Fort Detrick Laboratory. Of course, International Law says that the US have every right to inspect anything and everything in the WIV (and anywhere else the US want to inspect), and no one has any right to inspect the TS/SCI/NOFORN facility at Fort Detrick, so the CPC are in egregious violation of the Rules-based-order while the US is squeaky clean!

Fauci lied that he had never sponsored any gain-of-function research at all, but the research outsourced to the WIV was dangerous, not gain-of-function at all, but still too dangerous to perform in the US, so he had prudently outsourced that research to the WIV.

Senator Rand Paul said that Fauci had redefined gain-of-function research, that Fauci’s definition is not the correct definition, and the projects Fauci started in Fort Detrick and then moved to the WIV were most assuredly gain-of-function research projects. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ answered Fauci, but Senator Paul also has a license in medicine and was a practicing physician at a high level before becoming a Senator, so he knows what he’s talking about, and we now know that Fauci lies. A lot.

Net: CoViD-19 is, as many in the US claim, a government sponsored military weapon. But, since it started in Fort Detrick and since the WIV work was bought and paid for and directed by US virologists, many of them military virologists, even though it was developed in the WIV, the US still own it.

Nordstream Pipeline Destruction Investigations

 Since 1823, the US have been the leading neo-colonial power, saying European nations had better stay out of Latin America. The Americans call this the Monroe Doctrine. For the next 75 years, the US condemned colonialism, where European nations sent their armies into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, conquered countries, and installed ethnic Europeans as the senior government officials, with the resident head of state a European, and the ultimate head of state the head of the European colonising nation.

In Latin America, the US military helped nations achieve independence from their former European colonisers, who had been robbing the nations blind. The US selected a small minority, the Castillanos, in the decolonised Latin American countries and gave them money and weapons with which they took over the governments of those nations and ran their own country, knowing that they had to do what the US leadership and oligarchs told them to do or they would be replaced. All the resources in their country, formerly stolen by the colonial powers, went to US oligarchs, and ordinary Americans got cheap bananas. Most of those in the neocolonised Latin American countries remained very poor, but the tiny minority put in power by the US were rich, and, of course, the US oligarchs were obscenely wealthy. But the country were nominally run by their own citizens, not by citizens of some other country, so they were a neocolony, not a colony.

After WWII, the US expanded their neocolonialism from Latin America to Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Unlike in Latin America, they kept most Western Europeans prosperous, so they would fear the USSR and do whatever the US wanted, and did the same in Japan and South Korea so they would fear the PRC and the DRPK. After the collapse of the USSR, the US expanded their neocolonialism to the former Warsaw Pact.

So, after the US and Norway destroyed the Nordstream Pipeline in September 2022, the US gave the leaderships of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden two choices: investigate and say Russia destroyed their own pipeline, or keep the investigation going forever, never reaching any conclusion, and all three agreed on the second option, at least for now.

Russia demand a real investigation, and the PRC agree. The rest of the UN Security Council all say that Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are doing a great job and must be allowed to continue, with all their findings strictly confidential. The US, of course, lie that it has been irrefutably proven that the US had absolutely nothing to do with the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines, and it is Russia alone that want the German, Danish, and Swedish investigation stopped before they prove that Russia were responsible.

Blockading Russia

 Back in 1960, the US put an embargo on Cuba. This was perfectly legal: the US said no US citizen or permanent resident could buy anything from Cuba. Since most of Cuban industry was buying from and selling to the US, this was a problem for Cuba, but the USSR promised to buy the sugar and cigars Cuba sold and to sell whatever Cuba needed to buy. So it was a very short-lived problem, just until things got sorted and Cuba started selling everywhere except the US.

This annoyed the US, but the USSR were too strong, so Cuban sugar and cigars were sold everywhere, and the US seethed.

But then the USSR collapsed, and the US could and did go to a blockade: No one could buy from or sell to Cuba. So Cubans die from lack of medicines. A blockade is usually illegal under international law, unless you are the Hegemon, too strong for anyone to dare challenge, as the US was after the USSR ceased to exist.

The US have now blockaded Russia, but India and the PRC are ignoring the blockade and buying all the Russia energy Russia formerly sold to the EU at below market value.

So the US have threatened India and the PRC that, if they do not respect the US blockade on Russia, there will be severe consequences.

So what will India and the PRC do? Will they accept that the US are the strongest nation, militarily and economically, and agree to abide by the US blockade, since failure to abide by a US blockade is a heinous violation of the Rules-Based-Order, where the US make all the rules and give all the orders.

Or will they defy the US and continue to trade with Russia.

My guess is that both India and the PRC know the immense power of the US and the horrible consequences of defying the US, so the chances are that India and the PRC will follow the Rules-based-Order and stop all trade with Russia: For India, those chances are slim and for the PRC, those chances are none.

When Two Fronts are Better than One, How to Get that Second Front???

 In 2012, Graham Allister wrote "The Thucydides Trap," that, with the fall of the USSR, the US became Global Hegemon, and 75% of the time, hegemons fight tooth and nail to keep their hegemony, so it was very likely that the US would go to war with the PRC.

Crystal Balls have their limitations, and Russia got uppity, so the US decided to provoke Russia into attacking the Ukraine by threatening to make the Ukraine part of NATO with US military bases, and with nukes that could hit Russia in less than a minute, too quickly for Russia to respond thereby removing Russian MAD. This was a brilliant plan. The entire Russian economy was based on selling energy to the West and using the money to buy everything Russia needed from the West, so, when Russia attacked the Ukraine, the sanctions destroyed the Russian economy and the Ukraine, armed with advanced US weapons, easily defeated the entire Russian military with their "outmoded and inept" weapons (as the Western media describe them). Plus, of course, Russia had no money to pay their military, so they suffered a quick and total defeat and we'll have regime change in just a fortnight.

Russia's complete and total defeat has remained just a fortnight away in all the Western media since March 2022. Any suggestion that Russia might possibly be able to win the war is strictly prohibited, no major new outlet can allow any reporter to write such an article, and all those writing for the alternative media are denounced as fools or Russian agents spreading misinformation that no American with a 2-or-more-digit IQ would ever believe.

But now it is time to provoke the PRC into attacking Taiwan. Sending the Speaker of the House seemed like a good start, and a senior member of the PRC said the PLA Air Force would prevent her aeroplane from landing in Taiwan, but then the PRC did nothing.

It turns out that the PRC say they will have a World Class military in 2027. It appears they will not take on the US before 2027. The US know about the 2027 goal, and insist that war must be provoked before 2026.

Back in the '70s, when Kissinger was running the US, he convinced the US to appease Mao in order to pry the PRC away from the USSR. The US agreed that Taiwan was a part of the PRC, and downgraded their Taiwan Embassy to an Institute. The Institute is the same as an Embassy, but the name has been changed.

The agreement Kissinger got the PRC to accept was that the US and Taiwan would always say that Taiwan was just another province of the PRC, no different from any other province, but would act as if Taiwan were an independent nation.

So the US were always careful not to do anything that made it terribly and painfully obvious that Taiwan were an American neo-colony. But that was Before.

The PRC were, formerly, a valuable resource for the US leadership. The PRC provided cheap labour, so the US could lay off expensive US workers and replace them with cheap PRC workers and greatly increase the profits of US oligarchs (and US politicians who got generous baksheesh).

But the PRC are getting too strong, strong enough to challenge US Global Hegemony, so we need a proxy war in Taiwan where the sanction will destroy the PRC economy and Taiwan, with advanced US weapons, will easily defeat the PLA.

But, to be safe, that proxy war needs to take place before 2026. And the PRC seem like a very cautious fish, not rising to any US bait.

The provocations will, of course, get more and more provocative. The new Speaker has said he's going to Taiwan. The US is talking about treaties with Taiwan (before, they could never be called 'treaties'). What will it take to get the PRC to invade and try to conquer Taiwan, and thereby be utterly destroyed?

The US will try anything and everything to get their proxy war in Taiwan before 2026.

And the PRC will put up with a lot that they would never have put up with before, at least until 2027.

NATO remain determined to destroy Russia (and take Russian energy sources as reparations?)

 Several leaders of NATO countries have promised large numbers of heavy weapons. And the Western media, as usual, assure us that Russia are losing about 1,000 troops a day to NATO artillery, and Putin has just about completely run out of soldiers, so regime change must be close.

Western media have repeatedly described the complete destruction of the Russian invasion force since the conflict started, and Russia have never, since 1 March, been able to hold out for more than a fortnight.

The US made it clear that all petroleum resources are US property (except for Saudi, who bought their oil property back, giving Western investors a good profit).

Mossadegh and the Shah both thought Iranian oil should be for the Iranian people, so the US removed both as Head of State. Sadly, the Shah's replacements have been even more hostile to the West than the Shah was.

And Venezuela still refuse to return all the US oil in Venezuela, and have not been convinced by the US blockade.

But surely Russia can be convinced, since all of NATO are determined to help the US break up Russia into small, harmless, independent (at least independent on Russia, they can depend on NATO if they need anything) nations, all of whose petroleum products belong to the US.

But this war on Russia does not seem to be going nearly as well as the wars on Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan, except in the Western media, which are read and believed by the NATO leadership, and where Russia have already been decisively defeated.